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Friday, January 18, 2013

The last couple weeks I've been pushing hard to finish up my king size quilt. I made the quilt top in the spring of 2011 as part of a Naked Bed Challenge on twitter. I got the quilt backing made soon after we moved into the house here in Washington, at the end of 2012. (I don't think I've taken a picture of the back yet, though.) I started the machine quilting at that time too, but lost steam on it and put it away for a while. Then, I was getting all gung ho and ready to finish it up around the end of June, right before I hurt my finger and had to take an extended break from sewing.

So anyway, finishing the quilt is on my sewing list for January, and I'm getting really close! I've been taking photos and posting them to instagram as I go; if you are on instagram and want to follow me, my username is VickiDJL. Here's a recap of the last few days of work:

Quilting a feather in the sashing.

Ironing the quilt back to prepare for adding in the last section of batting. I lowered my ironing board to about 18" tall to do this. It was silly. I'll explain how I did the batting more completely when I blog about the finished quilt.

Quilt all rolled up while I was quilting the last section of quilt blocks (the green mug is my thread stand):

Center section all quilted, borders still need to be quilted:

Reverse view of some of the quilting. The big feather at the bottom is part of the border:

More of what the border quilting looks like, from the back:

The border fabric on the front and thread are both gray and the quilting doesn't show up well, especially in the evening after the sun has gone down. So I flipped over the border for this picture, and then had a dancing girl who wanted to be in the photo too. If you look closely, you can see the loopy quilting I'm doing as filler around the big border feather.

I have all the border feathers finished, and just need to finish adding in loopy filler quilting on two more sides of the quilt, and then the machine quilting will be done. There are a few more sections of hand quilting to do, then binding and labeling, and then it will be completed!

Great job! especially the top quilting..a large quilt on a regular machine...would LOVE LOVE LOVE to hear tips, tricks and techniques on how you did this! I fear doing larger than a twin cause of this.. I have trouble doing a twin in anything other than meandering!

Oh my GOSH! I had no idea such intricate quilting could be done on a home machine and a king size quilt no less! I have a hard time with just throw size. If possible, would you break down your process so that I can attempt it? Any other tips or advice? I'm pretty good at stippling and straight line quilting, but how do you manage the bulk???

I am VERY impressed! It's so hard to machine quilt a king sized quilt! And your designs are wonderful! Nice looking quilt too! Click on my sidebar to find my quilting blog piece-fulness if you would like to come by and visit.